matrilineage

Art historian Jessica Dallow explores the artistic matrilineage of the Saar family in her essay, "Departures and Returns: Figuring the Mother's Body in the Art of Betye and Alison Saar." Citing the installation of Alison Saar's Fertile Ground (1993), Dallow posits that the work is not just symbolically about the mother's body as a "source of creativity--an arena of play or exploration--but also a material, professional model," removing the division between home and work (62).

Perhaps matrilineage is the "unpredictable residue" of some "archaic power" reflected in Sarah's miraculous laughter that heralds the birth of Isaac and provides him with his name.

the society recognises both the patrilineage and the matrilineage but assigns to each a different set of expectations.

Every Akan belonged to an asafo group on their father's side, just as every person belonged to an abusua or matrilineage, on their mother's side (Owusu, 1970:41).

(30.) This same configuration of matrilineage, kin-based alliance networks, and female power has also appeared in works dealing with the Cherokees, the Indians of precolonial Texas and the desert Southwest.

The abusua kuruwa, literally "cup of the matrilineage", or clan pot, was incorporated during the finale of a funeral, when the abusua, or matrilineal clan, of the deceased ate together and made an offering of sustenance for their departed member.

Perhaps in reaction to the importance of matrilineage in Julio-Claudian succession, historians of the early Principate obsessively depict mothers and stepmothers of the imperial family as a powerful and corrupting presence in imperial life--plotting, dissimulating, seducing, and being seduced.

The success of one chief allowed "the brothers [to] not only claim victory for themselves, but also for their sisters and for the next matrilineage. Their acquired power would then pass through their sisters to the next generation." (23) Following victory, or when a major conflict occurred and resolution was necessary, the men would call on the eldest mother or daughter of the clan to make peace, known as the leejmanjjuri, literally, "to confront aggression and stomp it out." (24) Greg Dvorak unpacks the phrase lejman juri and shares a different yet related reading: "The Marshallese expression lejman juri is a term that means, 'when a woman speaks, the men must give way.'...